Like Elyjah Bynum’s head-turning 2023 Sundance entry, Magazine Dreams, a film whose commercial life was derailed by domestic abuse charges against star Jonathan Majors, Test is a tightly focused character study about a bodybuilder whose mental health at times appears to be hanging by a thread. What makes Sam McConnell’s film transfixing, however, is the very personal nature of the drama, written by star Brock Yurich and clearly inspired by his own story. It explores the corrosive internal conflict of a young heavyweight pushing to turn professional while struggling to reconcile his emerging sexuality with his faith and his need for independence with his suffocatingly co-dependent mother.
Unlike Magazine Dreams, the modest but satisfying Test avoids the lurid descent into violent psychodrama that swerved into hallucinatory Taxi Driver territory and undercut that film’s integrity. McConnell’s direction and Yurich’s script might occasionally be earnest to a fault, but the movie’s emotional authenticity and depth of compassion make it an affecting character study — a contemplation of hard-won queer identity that’s soulful and often saddening but judicious in its avoidance of overblown tragedy.
